Tuesday, July 31, 2012

A Non-Poet King of Poetry: Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his studio. Photograph by Alfonso Sánchez Portela.

Either Spanish
literature consists of nothing but anomalistic masterpieces or I’ve had
exceptional good fortune in my selections for Spanish Literature Month.[i]I decided to stick to Spain itself (easier said than done), and have been
surprised, humbled, and not a little awestruck by what I’ve found. My choices
came largely by chance; I read each knowing next to nothing about its author,
content, or place in the Spanish canon. Each not only turned out to have had
significant impact on Spanish literature, but also moved into the ranks of my personal
favorites from any literature. Following
Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina (1499) and Angel Ganivet’s The Conquest
of the Kingdom of Maya (1897), my final selection for the month hails from
the 20th century, two books by an author who came to my attention
only this week. Thanks to terrific posts by Miguel ofSt. Orberoseconcerning
lists compiled by Jorge Luis Borges for two book series Borges had started to
edit, I took a look at some of the names on the lists I didn’t recognize.

How is it possible that
I’ve made it this far through life without ever hearing of Ramón Gómez de la
Serna (1888-1963)? Any of you who might also be late to this party may well
ask: why should I have heard of him? Let’s
see what the introduction to one of these books, a collection of eight novellas
by Gómez de la Serna entitled (with remarkable restraint) Eight Novellas[ii],
has to say about him:

…the
literary mentor of Buñuel and Dalí.

…the
Spanish writer most sought after and the one who had the strongest impact on
the Latin American avant-garde writers from the nineteen twenties on…

…often
considered one of the two true artistic geniuses of his time in Spain, the
other being Picasso.

Okay, so that’s the
opinion of the editors/translators. Do they provide assessments other than
their own? They do:

As
Ortega [y Gasset] describes how the new [modernist] art looks at reality…he
refers to Proust and Joyce but cites only Ramón.

Gabriel
Garcia Márquez declared that Ramón was the most influential writer of his
formative years.

Cortázar
regarded him highly, and used to follow him along the Calle Florida as an idol.

Okay then. But how about
some primary sources?

“…for
me he is the great Spanish writer” – Octavio Paz

“…a
visionary of the universe, mental monarch and king of poetry” – Pablo Neruda.

Coming full circle, the
introduction notes: “Borges wrote a book about him.”

One excuse for my not
having heard of Gómez de la Serna is that little of his work has been
translated into English, aside from scattered anthologized stories; an old
issue of the literary journal Zero
containing a handful of stories translated by Paul Bowles; and the Eight
Novellas I’d found in the library. There’s a selection, published in
English as Aphorisms and which I also found in the library, of the
literary form Gómez de la Serna invented and called greguerías – short, humorous, imagistic, aphoristic one-liners.
Finally, there’s one of de la Serna’s twenty novels translated as Movieland!
(it’s supposedly about Hollywood). This, alas, was not in the library, and the price
of the sole copy I could find for sale - $1,000 U.S. - put me off a bit.

The biographical details
of Ramón’s life - I’ll switch to using his first name, as that’s apparently how
he’s known in Spain - are perhaps even more incredible than the praise heaped
upon him. It’s worth picking up these books just for the biosketches they
contain; the Wikipedia entry for Ramón does not quite convey the outlandishness
and electrical presence he apparently commanded. Suffice here to say that he was
a catalyst – really the catalyst –
for avant-garde Spanish literature and art, living a wildly inventive lifestyle
and inhabiting a Madrid apartment more like a cabinet of curiosities than a
residence. He bridges Spanish and Latin American literature, as he left Spain at
the beginning of the civil war and lived out his life in Argentina. His
prolific literary output comprises some 90 books of short stories, plays,
novels, essays, literary criticism, biographies and, the contribution for which
he may be best known, his beloved greguerías.

The greguerías make a
good a place to start, especially since they make their way into his longer
pieces with a style so singular that it bears his name: ramónismo. Aphorisms is a curious title for this collection
of some 400 greguerías, since translator Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth goes to great
lengths to distinguish them from aphorisms (his introduction is as succinct and
invaluable an analysis of the aphoristic genre as one is likely to find anywhere).
Ramón’s greguerías are exceptionally playful, experimental, lyrical
condensations that illustrate how Neruda could call him a “king of poetry” even
when poetry was one genre Ramón did not attempt. Poetic they are nonetheless:

Clouds
should bear tags disclosing their destination so we don’t worry about them.

In
the background of all mirrors there crouches a photographer.

The
fragrance of flowers is an echo.

It
was such nice weather that all keys took the day off.

Cloves
of garlic: witches’ teeth.

Distant
sails like napkins in the goblets at the banquet of the sea.

We
should take more time to forget; that way we would have a longer life.

Gonzalez-Gerth notes
that the form originated during a visit to Florence when, gazing upon the Arno,
Ramón “suddenly perceived that each of the two banks of the river wanted to be
where the other one was…an extraordinary perception [by which] all pairs and
even peers among things became involved in a sort of natural and fatal
competition of desire which altered the whole humdrum surface of reality.” Thus
the genre was born, and Ramón came to define it mathematically: “metaphor +
humor = greguería.”

This condensed metaphorical
form gets woven into the absurdist stories constituting the enormously
enjoyable Eight Novellas: a man’s liver appearing at his doorstop one
day to move in as a constant companion; a misanthrope who spends a part of
every day aspiring to become a physical feature of Naples’ Principe di Napoli galleria;
a battle against influenza waged largely by amateur medical opinion; a
revolution of hat haters; a mathematical approach to understanding social
interactions in an apartment building; a lady who vanishes mysteriously from a hotel
(the inspiration for the Alexander Woollcott novel that in turn inspired Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes); a man attempting to recuperate from a
failed marriage by building a short-wave radio and immersing himself in its
aural world; and a mad scientist intent on splitting the atom. These cursory
descriptions barely hint at the humorous, often moving and glittering poeticism
mingled with glimpses of the profound that one finds in these tales, which call
to mind the work of Nikolai Gogol, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, and Frigyes
Karinthy (Gonzalez-Gerth also mentions the poet Christian Morgenstern), but
with a lighter yet more wildly energetic touch by which ideas shoot off like
showers of sparks from a Roman (Ramón?) candle.

In “The Flumaster” (“Le
Gran Griposo”), Ramón presents a plethora of dazzling greguerían descriptions of what it feels like to have the flu and addresses
the myriad ways people deny illness by proposing all kinds of rationalizations
and quack therapies. The afflicted protagonist even wonders if “he could ever
find the word that would banish the flu! Success might come by using one word
against another.” This remarkably pure modernist concept suggests something of
the quality of ramónismo. Ramón
writes as though slowly turning a complex kaleidoscope filled with words that tumble
into different metaphorical combinations. But – and here he differs from surrealists
out for pure effect – he also seems to point his kaleidoscope/microscope/telescope
towards every emerging aspect of the modern world, sometimes with a penetrating
view into the future. The introduction notes Ramón’s uncanny anticipation of
such things as the Internet, various medical and psychological discoveries, the
impact of car culture, and even a frighteningly prescient prediction of the
atomic bomb, which, via his far-seeing 1926 story “The Master of the Atom” (“El
dueño del átomo”), he claimed to have invented. The sophistication of Ramón’s surrealism
shows in his story “Kill the Morse!” (“¡Hay que matar el Morse!”), where he
refers not to the difference between the real and the unreal, as would be the
expected approach, but to that “between the real and the real that seems unreal
because it is so far away.”

Ramón’s imagistic
sentences often display a kind of fever of composition and experimentation, frequently
resulting in startling originality, energy, lyricism, depth, and varieties of
beauty that could make the snowflake community jealous. Far from appearing
labored or crafted, his prose has a wildly free, extemporaneous quality, a
vital and living language. Like his revolutionary hat-hater, “free from the torture
of holding onto his hat” and at liberty to stroll through the world “enjoying
the challenge of a cane, twirling, riposting, parrying,” Ramón Gómez de la
Serna demands the new, and delivers it with flair, joy, and a freedom of spirit
rare in literature. I can’t wait to read more.

6 comments:

Great choices, Scott! I read many of the greguerías for a class years and years ago but had somehow forgotten how amusing many of them are. Was totally in the dark re: "Ramón"'s other work, so this post comes as a very nice surprise. P.S. Neruda's "mental monarch" = awesome--as long as he wasn't imputing intellectual butterfly qualities of some sort to don Ramón...

Thanks, Richard. I think you'd like the stories a lot. And while underrepresented in English translation, Ramón was apparently a big deal in France, so a couple of cheap French translations are on their way to me. And no, I doubt Neruda was being cleverly equivocal. Ramón's images are just too striking, and besides, the introduction adds that Neruda sought to stay with Ramón every time he visited Buenos Aires.

The original greguería is actually "Fragance is the flowers' echo.", not "The fragrance of flowers is an echo." I'm a native Spanish-speaker and I translate small or medium-sized texts as a hobby, I'm willing to translate anything you want from Gómez de la Serna, just ask.